Wood Romances

There is a table floating around X and other social media outlets being used to claim that even the IPCC acknowledges that most extreme weather events are not increasing in frequency or severity. This claim comes from a misreading of Table 12.12 in the AR6 report from the IPCC. The line of reasoning comes almost entirely from this chart, and in the past, I've responded to several people making these claims by quoting from the text of AR6 to clarify what it says about some of these climate impact drivers (CIDs). But Tim Osborn put together a series of posts on X that does a better job of explaining how badly these people are misreading the chart. Following extended arguments on X is sometimes difficult, especially for those who (like me) don't pay to be able to make longer posts. So I thought it would be helpful to reproduce his argument here in a manner that is more easy to digest without the need to scroll through several posts and hope you're keeping them in order. I wan...

Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr has published two posts recently having to do with extreme weather and the IPCC. In the first post , he expresses frustration over an apparently inevitable retraction of a paper on extreme weather. The paper is Alimonti et al 2022 (A22) published in The European Physical Journal Plus (EPJP)[1]. I became aware of this paper about a year ago; it was not a good paper and was not particularly influential; it received almost no attention except for a brief period of time when the usual blogs promoted it, and then after SkyNews in Australia publicized this study as demonstrating there is no climate emergency. In the second post , Pielke summarized what he believes the IPCC's position is on extreme weather, and here he refers again to this previous paper. He declares that he believes that popular and scientific treatments of extreme weather have become far mor extreme than the position taken by the IPCC. According to him, "with the exception perhaps of only extr...

The Best-Fit Trend assumes a "Sensitivity" of 2.35 C I decided to have a bit of fun playing around with CO2 and global temperature data. I downloaded CO2 concentration values from 1850 to 2021 as well as HadCRUT5 annual data, which I set to a 1850-1900 baseline, for the same time frame. I put both into a Google Sheets spreadsheet. I then calculated the expected change in temperature from the 1850-1900 mean using the formula: dT = (S/F2x)*ln (C1/C0), where dT = Change in temperature (C) S = A sensitivity value. F2x = The forcing for doubling CO2 (3.71 W/m^2) C1 = CO2 in any given year (ppm) C0 = Preindustrial CO2 (280 ppm) I then plotted both the actual temp anomaly and my calculated anomaly with CO2 on the X-axis, then had my spreadsheet draw a logarithmic trend through the actual temperature data. Then I chose an S value that matched that logarithmic trend, and I came up with 2.35 C. It occurs to me that this value is too small for ECS, since this doesn't account for the...